"We Will Pass Those Tariff Costs Back to the Consumer," Says CEO of AutoZone

With NAFTA/NAFTA 2, it doesn't make sense to manufacture in the USA anyway when they have cheaper labor in Mexico. China knows this too.

There was an interview (in the Washington Post?) with a cattle rancher who wanted higher tariffs. This is because international competition forced him to sell at lower prices. The tariffs would increase international beef so he could then raise his prices (selling to his fellow Americans).

Of course in the interview the same rancher wanted Trump to lower inflation and reduce the prices on his inputs.

So inflation should be lower for him, but higher for his customers.

But they're often not, e.g. Biden kept many of the tariffs Trump imposed and even increased some of them.

> Interestingly the importer in the article was looking at alternate chains of supply, but "manufacturing in the US" wasn't one of his proposed solutions.

This is obviously going to depend on the nature of the industry, but even when it moves to other countries, this can still be of benefit to the US because then those countries develop an industry instead of US consumers relying on a single supplier country as a monopolist and single point of failure. That could even long-term reduce prices as those other countries then compete with each other once the tariffs allow them to develop their manufacturing base.

> It also assumes that countries don't respond with tit-for-tat tarifs which harm factories already in the US.

Tit-for-tat would require the country on the wrong end of the tariffs to be importing as much from the US as the US does from them.

It would also require that country to actually avoid buying US products. Maybe it's easier to move sneaker manufacturing to Vietnam than to replace high tech products from US companies.

It would also require that country to not already be disfavoring US imports, as might be implied from an imbalance of trade to begin with.

But that's the point. They generate revenue for the government, allowing the government to lower other taxes with the result that people aren't actually paying anything more on net but you've created a penalty for goods imported from adversarial countries that domestic manufacturers can avoid.

The Hoover dam was built in 5 years, 2 years after the idea was approved. Skyscrapers of the same era were built by men walking on I-beams, untethered, hundreds of feet in the air. We have become too risk averse to compete internationally.

Just the NEPA paperwork for a new project can take 5 years. For NEPA in particular, we pay employees at the state level to file the paperwork and employees at the federal level to review it. There is no way that is an efficient use of public funds. All it does is slow down our development and put the power of controlling development in each state in the hands of the feds. We are essentially paying twice to ask for permission to build the things we want to build.

But in any case, where there's an incentive, there's a way. Alternative inputs will be sought.